Leah Young, an American living in Lyon, pays €950 ($1,104) a month for a one-bedroom flat in a 16th-century building in France’s third-largest city, and says the move, which began as a one-year teaching contract in Spain back in 2015, has settled into something that feels permanent. Young is the founder of Fearless Abroad, a company that helps Americans working remotely relocate to Europe, and her own story spans Spain, Germany, Argentina, Brazil, and now France.
From a €700 Teaching Stipend to Running a Relocation Business
Young grew up in Dallas and had tried for years to find a way abroad, looking into exchange programmes and study-abroad schemes in high school and college without success. The opening came when a friend flagged a government-run teaching programme in Spain that was accepting applications. Young applied, despite working in a different industry at the time, and moved in 2015 on a contract worth €700 ($813) a month, a figure she describes as barely enough even then.
The bureaucratic side was daunting. Her programme granted permission to enter, but the visa process itself fell to her, and she pieced together guidance from Facebook groups and personal blogs. She arrived with two suitcases, she says, filled with the wrong things, and no direct contacts who had done anything similar. She had planned to stay a year. She stayed five in Spain, then spent two years in Germany, a year in Argentina, a year in Brazil, and has now been in Lyon for a year.
Her career shifted repeatedly alongside her geography. The teaching role gave way to a student visa and further study, then remote work for a US-based employer, and eventually the founding of her own business. That trajectory (building new skills and professional confidence across successive moves) is not unusual among younger Americans who relocate internationally. According to data reported by CNBC, 71% of 18 to 34-year-old respondents said they had picked up new skills as a result of moving abroad, and just under a third (31%) said they believed they were promoted more quickly after making the move.
The American Living in Lyon on What the Numbers Actually Look Like
Young’s flat in Lyon’s old town is 678 square feet, in a historic building that dates to the 1500s. Stone walls, wooden beams, tall ceilings, and large French windows overlooking the street come with the rent. She found it within two days through word of mouth. The utility bill swings considerably with the seasons: roughly €50 ($58) a month in summer without air conditioning, rising to around €350 ($407) during the coldest months because the old building is expensive to heat.
Beyond rent and utilities, she spends about €60 ($70) a week on groceries, cooks most of her meals at home, and eats out roughly twice a week. A glass of wine or beer costs around €5 ($6). She has no car, travels the city for less than $10 a week by train, and can reach Germany by air for around €50 ($58) return. Lyon itself sits about two hours from Geneva near the Swiss border, with the Alps accessible within an hour or two and the Mediterranean not much further.
The contrast with Texas, where she says rents have surged and one-bedroom apartments can run to $2,000 a month, is one she returns to often. Healthcare costs are the other factor. She describes European healthcare as high quality without the financial exposure that makes US medical care feel precarious, a concern she says grows as she thinks about the future and the possibility of having children.
Lyon’s social texture also matters to her. She had found some European cities difficult for building friendships, which she attributes to being outgoing by nature. Lyon, she says, has been easier, a large city that carries a smaller-town feel, and what she calls a quintessentially traditional version of France without the cost or scale of Paris.
Young says she considers France her likely permanent home, though she stops short of certainty. What she is certain about is that of all the places she has lived, Lyon is where she is happiest, and that Fearless Abroad now exists precisely because the process of getting there, from the first visa paperwork to finding a flat in two days through a chance conversation, was harder than it needed to be for anyone doing it alone.